1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to information recording medium, such as an optical disc, a method of recording disc version information thereof, recording and/or reproducing method using the disc version information recording and/or reproducing, and a recording and reproducing apparatus thereof.
2. Discussion of the Related Art
Generally, information recording medium, e.g., an optical disc on which a large volume of data is recordable is widely used as an optical record medium. Recently, many efforts are made to develop a new high density optical record medium (HD-DVD), on which video data of high definition and audio data of high quality, program data of large capacity can be recorded and stored, such as a Blu-ray disc (BD) and the like.
The Blu-ray disc that is a sort of a next generation HD-DVD technology is the next generation optical record solution enabling to be fully equipped with data to remarkably surpass the previous DVD, and the technology specifications of global standardizations for the Blu-ray disc are being established together with other digital equipment.
Various kinds of specifications associated with Blu-ray discs have been prepared. Specifically, various specifications for a 2×-speed (or higher) rewritable Blu-ray disc (BD-RE) following the 1×-speed BD-RE, a write-once Blu-ray disc (BD-WO), and a read-only Blu-ray disc (BD-ROM) have been prepared.
In spite of the same kind of Blu-ray disc, version of specified contents for the Blu-ray disc keeps being updated to keep up with the technological development. For instance, disc specifications of the 1×-speed rewritable Blu-ray disc are extending like those of the 2×-speed (or higher) rewritable Blu-ray disc do. Hence, the extending specified contents need to be managed as disc version information.
Referring to FIG. 1, FIG. 1 illustrates a method of representing DVD disc version information according to a related art, 4 bits are allocated to a management area of a disc to display version information. Whenever a new version is implemented, additional bits are allocated to display the version.
The disc version information is used in determining whether a given recorder/reproducer can reproduce the data of a recorded disc. Hence, the disc version needs to be recorded by a more unified and extendible method. In the case of a BD-RE, BD-R, or BD-ROM disc of which specifications are under discussion, the method of recording the disc version information are being discussed as well. Therefore, an efficient solution for recording the disc version information in a high density optical disc is urgently needed, which should be provided as standardized information to secure mutual compatibility.